Have you heard about the right wing comedy revival? Well, there’s big news: they have thought of a second joke.
Conservatives aren’t funny. We don’t know why. Maybe they are too smart, so their jokes go over our heads. Maybe they have all been cancelled. Conservatives were certainly funny once – literature is full of great satirists like H L Mencken and Saki. But whatever the reason, modern conservativism falls short. The political right isn’t funny, and the death of P J O’Rourke has left it unfunnier still.
In popular culture he represented something very twentieth century Republican, the world of after-dinner remarks and country-club speeches and things jotted on napkins, his books typically found in hotels and B&Bs and in the homes of people who don’t, typically, read for pleasure – between the volumes of Len Deighton and Golfing Nightmares.
But O’Rourke represented something else, as well – the last of a certain kind of Republican, the kind of Republican who was flexible on detail and secure in their beliefs, the kind of Republican that could handle losing a free election, the kind of Republican that could laugh at themselves.
One critic – I can’t find who – described O’Rourke as ‘a prose comedian’. That is PJ, and it always struck me how careful his prose was for such a supposedly light writer. The many fantastic lines – ‘Hilary, mind your own business. Bill, keep your hands to yourself’, ‘No one has ever had a sexual fantasy about anyone dressed as a liberal’, ‘We’re against gun control. You can shoot us’ – only really make sense in the context of the articles. With PJ there was always a second joke, then a third, and then more.
I also respect PJ because he never followed his fellow conservatives down the road of ruin that led to the Trump administration. He was relaxed about immigration and, in 2016, endorsed Hillary Clinton: ‘Hillary is wrong about everything. She is to politics and statecraft what Pope Urban VIII and the Inquisition were to Galileo. She thinks the sun revolves around herself. But Trump Earth™ is flat. We’ll sail over the edge. Here be monsters.’ It’s hardly a glowing recommendation but if the establishment Republicans had the balls to do likewise, we might have been spared the whole circus.
If much of PJ’s stuff was about life in general – cars, hunting, family, dogs, etc – that was because he had a life beyond politics, because he had lived. As a young man he threw himself into the counterculture and as a journalist he travelled to what Christopher Hitchens called ‘dangerous and difficult places’ for many years. I think all this experience gave him a sense of perspective other conservatives lack.
To revisit the old joke with which I began this piece. Modern conservatives aren’t funny. Satirists on Spiked, Andrew Doyle, Unherd – they’re not funny. They have too much invested in the culture war, too much to lose, and it shows. Their stuff is embittered and overwrought, and it fails as polemic and as humour.
The article that most resonates with me was a piece PJ wrote about his childhood – ‘Why I’m Not Afraid of the Dark’:
My father had died when I was nine, and my mother, a kindly but not very sensible woman, had remarried to a drunken oaf. He was a pestering, bullying sort of man whose favorite subject of derision was my fondness for books.
Young PJ confronted his fear of the darkness when his home environment became so nasty and fraught (‘my stepfather was bellowing threats and the dog was barking and the television was blaring in the background of it all — a scene I still envision whenever I hear the phrase ‘hell on earth”) that he physically had to leave the house, if only to sit for a while in a local park:
I decided darkness must symbolize something more general for me. Evil, I decided. That’s why I imagined monsters in the dark. Monsters are evil because they do evil things, which is what makes them monstrous. But I recognized that as circular reasoning. No, I had to consider what evil really was. Evil was harm and destruction. Murdering people, that was evil, or burning their houses down. These were the sorts of things evil forces might do, the kind of forces that darkness symbolized for me. Such forces might rage into a home like my own and murder one of my sisters or both of my sisters or even my mother and tear the house to pieces, breaking it into little bits and then blowing the ruins to smithereens with nitroglycerin and setting fire to what was left, and then take my stepfather and break both his arms and slice off his feet and poke his eyes out with red-hot staves, disembowel him, skin him alive. And then they’d attack the rest of the neighborhood and the police force and the school and burn and bomb and steal and break everything in that part of Ohio, from the filthy oil refineries on the east side of town all the way to the moldy, boring cottage we rented every summer at the lake. And who knew what such evil forces might do after that? I didn’t. But I sat on the swing set considering suggestions for a very long time. And I have never been afraid of the dark since.
Update: O’Rourke’s friend and colleague Matt Labash has a marvellous long tribute.
Max Dunbar 